Circularly self-referential and self-propagating information-processing systems, laws seek certainty by cultivating and generating referential systems which possess no ultimate or external authority, beyond those axiomatic assumptions upon which they are built. A certain necessity and importance of rectitude might be asserted from within any such hyper-inflating referential space but the ultimate authority that laws assert […]
It was Shakespeare who coined the phrase regarding love’s indifference to what we directly perceive with our senses but his intention was more to indicate that everything we do, no less – those deep visceral and emotional facts of our lives, are first and foremost mental phenomena. I love not what I see but what […]
What does it mean for a thing not to exist, for it to be quite literally “conspicuous by its absence”? When a thing that is there is removed, it is clearly an absence marked by memory or by material evidence, not that memory is perhaps all that trustworthy and notwithstanding that it is an irreducible […]
The first – and quite probably last – question will always have to be this one. All of our logical, mathematical and physical technologies or explanations and the essential cognitive hyper-extension of conceptual or material artefacts and information or energy-processing (i.e. computational) systems that we inhabit (and that equally, inhabit us) – this is all […]
We (all) often forget that every single thing any of us does is so stupendously unlikely in such a vast and ultimately meaningless Cosmos that every act, every thought and every artefact or consequence is of monumental significance. We corral these wonders into the small, everyday concepts and containers of art and objects we can […]
I would never suggest that any of us should let the truth get in the way of a good story (or sales pitch and project management agile scrum), but observe how often we end up with the developmental and technological cart placed (well) before the horse. Developments in AI tend towards various unknown (perhaps – […]
An interesting consequence of generalised attributions of human exceptionalism is that we tend to automatically believe that all intelligence, all value and all experience exist (and persist) in this diminutive cranial cavity we inhabit. Cogito ergo something is definitely going on between our ears but there is a deep and irreducible mystery at work (i.e. […]
The world is so beautiful and perfect in all the glorious randomness and unexpected symmetry or beauty of it’s flow and form. Why is it that the perfection of this world deviates in the way it does from simple linearity to recurse itself into hidden patterns of mathematical complexity that displace this symmetry into opaque […]
Freedom is a concept we all covet but the truth is we rarely understand or consider anything much more than the simplest of interpretations. Many of us interpret freedom from external as freedom to make choice. The choices we make are rarely as free and unaffected as we would prefer to believe. The world in […]
It is a simple truth. Fear drives most of our irrational decisions and our inability to admit it is in fact the greatest fallacy of all. Violence, war, hatred, discrimination, cruelty – it is all at base and in essence just fear under another name. People fear the truth of their own essential vulnerability more […]
Context: Graceful robotic swifts take flight in latest Festo demo Fascinating technologies. We should perhaps not be all that surprised when these technologies approach (if asymptotically) the neurophysiological and anatomical metabolic efficiencies and long-evolved adaptive aptitudes and spontaneous information-entropy-generation of living systems. Work is already and clearly being done in this area. Long-range blue-skies thinking […]
What I find unrelentingly entertaining about the technologically-mediated collective and aspirationally-individuated self-definitions of our historical moment is not that we (all, and each in our own ways) seek to create and sustain these distributed and functionally differential or dissociative Others of self-representation that we endlessly cultivate. What is more interesting is that we rarely notice, […]
